Google Drive REST API Overview

The Drive platform gives you a group of APIs along with client
libraries, language-specific examples, and documentation to help you
develop apps that integrate with Drive.

The core functionality of Drive
apps is to download and
upload files in Google Drive. However,
the Drive platform provides a lot more than just storage. This page describes
some of that functionality and points you to resources for building
it into your app.

Note: With the Drive platform, you'll use a model based on file IDs — rather than a traditional
folder hierarchy — when working with Google Drive files and folders. For
more information, see Work with Folders and
Manage File Metadata.

Contents

Search for files

Drive automatically indexes the content of most common file types
(e.g. .html, .xml, .txt, ...) for search as soon as they are uploaded.
Also, Drive uses OCR to find text in images or PDF files and
automated object recognition technology to examine and index identifiable
objects, people and places. For other resources such as drawings or other unique
file types that are not automatically indexed by Google,
apps can provide their own indexable text when they save
files to Drive.

Distribute and market through Google Drive

Drive-enabled apps allow users to create and open
content directly in the Drive UI. Drive-enabled apps are discoverable through the
Connect apps to Drive dialog inside Google Drive:

Once your app is ready to distribute to the
world, a listing in the Chrome Web Store will help it find the users that
need and want it. See Create a listing
for more information.

Share and collaborate

Google Drive apps can manage permissions and sharing settings of files. Also,
apps can provide commenting and discussions on files, allowing users to
work collaboratively on the documents they share in Drive. For more details
on these features, see Share files
and Manage Comments and Discussions.

Use shortcuts

Applications can create shortcuts to data stored outside of Drive, in a
different data store or cloud storage system.
If you need to store files or file-like resources outside of Drive for any
reason, shortcuts allow you to still list them in Google Drive.

Shortcuts behave a lot like files. They can be opened and created, indexed in
search, and shared with other users. Unlike regular files, shortcuts do not
contain any content.

Export and convert Google docs

The Drive platform allows developers to open, import, and export
native Google Docs types such as Google Spreadsheets, Presentations, Documents,
and Drawings. For instance, if your application is configured to open PDF files,
then because Google Documents are exportable to PDF, users will be able to use your
application to open those documents.